JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post

Nothing quite says crazy like crazy eyes, and the best sort of crazy eyes are Commie.  At least that is what we are led to believe in (“Attorney”) Jeremiah Stokes’ identity-romp through Democratic politics in his enormously-titled  America’s Castle of Freedom under Bolshevik Fire on Our Home Front Fateful Facts All Americans Must Know…

In what may be the first time I have seen someone identify themselves as an attorney in nearly 40 years of hard reading by putting the word in front of their name on the title page, Mr. Stokes fills up the title on the front of his pamphlet with 13 additional points. There are points in this slippery-mortared wall of protection that are salient; on the other hand there’s a lot of Commies-in-the-pink-sheets stuff too–particularly his indictment of President Roosevelt as a Communist agent.  

There are other pamphlets here that also make this claim–of Roosevelt’s constitution-crushing pagan Communism–but none I think are accompanied by the ad hominem assault giving him those crazy Commie eyes.  

Here’s the surprise: I thought that this publication would have been published in 1936/7 or thereabouts, but it actually came out in 1944, deep into Mr. Roosevelt’s superior presidency and nearly at the end of a war in which he played a broad part in winning. Mr. Stokes had some old scores to settle with the Democrats, and he used a very broad brush on a very small canvas.  People were very concerned about the Soviet Union in 1944, even as it had just emerged a year before from the meat-grinder assault by Germany.  Mr. Stokes was getting his readers ready for what was ahead, and for the Communist infiltrators that were already at home. While Stokes (from Salt Lake City, 1877-1954) could be considered far-right politically,  he late in life married Elizabeth Dilling, a propagandist of means who was far-right to his far-rightism.